Paper by Markus S. Tepe and Pieter Vanhuysse: “…explores the associations between self-reported Public Service Motivation (PSM) and preferred job traits, study choice, and observable prosocial behavior. We study three subject pools covering over 250 university students in Germany. We use laboratory experiments with monetary rewards to measure altruism, fairness, strategic fairness, and cooperativeness, and a post-experimental survey on subjects’ PSM. Higher levels of PSM are not associated with studying public administration but are positively associated with altruism and negatively with strategic fairness. The experimental data reveals robust subject-pool effects. After controlling for PSM, public administration students behave more altruistically and display less merely strategic fairness than business students. And they behave more cooperatively than business and law students. These behavioral findings about future bureaucrats corroborate cumulative earlier survey evidence about the higher prosocial tendencies of public sector employees. They point to the danger of crowding out such tendencies through overly extrinsic management tools….(More)”
A City Is a Data Pool: Blockchains and the Crypto-City
Paper by Jason Potts, Ellie Rennie and Jake Goldenfein: “The Smart City agenda of integrating ICT and Internet of Things (IoT) informatic infrastructure to improve the efficiency and adaptability of city governance has been shaping urban development policy for more than a decade now. A smart city has more data, gathered though new and better technology, delivering higher quality city services. In this paper, we explore how blockchain technology could shift the Smart City agenda by altering transaction costs with implications for the coordination of infrastructures and resources. Like the Smart City the Crypto City utilizes data informatics, but can be coordinated through distributed rather than centralized systems. The data infrastructure of the Crypto-City can enable civil society to run local public goods, and facilitate economic and social entrepreneurship. Drawing on economic theory of transaction costs, the paper sets out an explanatory framework for understanding the kinds of new governance mechanisms that may emerge in conjunction with automated systems, including the challenges that blockchain poses for cities….(More)”.
Tackling Challenges in the Engagement of Citizens with Smart City Initiatives
Paper by Long Pham and Conor Linehan: “Smart City (SC) initiatives offer best possible outcomes to citizens and other stakeholders when those people are involved centrally in all stages of the project. However, undertaking design processes that facilitate citizen engagement often involves prohibitive challenges in cost, design and deployment mechanisms, particularly for small cities that have limited resources. We report on a project carried out in Cork City, a small city in Ireland, where a method inspired by crowdsourcing was used to involve local participants in decisions regarding smart city infrastructure. Academics, local government, volunteers and civil organisations came together to collaboratively design and carry out a study to represent local interests around the deployment of smart city infrastructure. Our project demonstrates a new way of translating crowdsourcing for use in government problem-solving. It was comparatively inexpensive, creative in design, and flexible but collaborative in deployment, resulting in high volume of reliable data for project prioritisation and implementation….(More)”
Open Data as Enabler of Public Service Co-creation: Exploring the Drivers and Barriers
Paper by Maarja Toots: “Open data is being increasingly looked at as a major driver of public service innovation. Open access to datasets and advanced analytical tools are believed to generate valuable new knowledge that can be turned into data-driven services. At the same time, open data is also believed to spur open governance and enable the engagement of various stakeholders in the co-creation of services. Despite this appealing vision of open data-driven co-creation of public services, we are far from understanding how it can be realized in practice. We turned to 63 experts and practitioners in a survey covering six European countries and found a multitude of barriers that need to be overcome first. Luckily we also found some drivers. This paper provides some first insights into these drivers and barriers and proposes policy recommendations to foster a data-driven transformation of public service creation….(More)”.
Open data: Accountability and transparency
Matthew S Mayernik at Big Data and Society: “The movements by national governments, funding agencies, universities, and research communities toward “open data” face many difficult challenges. In high-level visions of open data, researchers’ data and metadata practices are expected to be robust and structured. The integration of the internet into scientific institutions amplifies these expectations. When examined critically, however, the data and metadata practices of scholarly researchers often appear incomplete or deficient. The concepts of “accountability” and “transparency” provide insight in understanding these perceived gaps. Researchers’ primary accountabilities are related to meeting the expectations of research competency, not to external standards of data deposition or metadata creation. Likewise, making data open in a transparent way can involve a significant investment of time and resources with no obvious benefits. This paper uses differing notions of accountability and transparency to conceptualize “open data” as the result of ongoing achievements, not one-time acts….(More)”.
Children and the Data Cycle: Rights And Ethics in a Big Data World
Gabrielle Berman andKerry Albright at UNICEF: “In an era of increasing dependence on data science and big data, the voices of one set of major stakeholders – the world’s children and those who advocate on their behalf – have been largely absent. A recent paper estimates one in three global internet users is a child, yet there has been little rigorous debate or understanding of how to adapt traditional, offline ethical standards for research involving data collection from children, to a big data, online environment (Livingstone et al., 2015). This paper argues that due to the potential for severe, long-lasting and differential impacts on children, child rights need to be firmly integrated onto the agendas of global debates about ethics and data science. The authors outline their rationale for a greater focus on child rights and ethics in data science and suggest steps to move forward, focusing on the various actors within the data chain including data generators, collectors, analysts and end-users. It concludes by calling for a much stronger appreciation of the links between child rights, ethics and data science disciplines and for enhanced discourse between stakeholders in the data chain, and those responsible for upholding the rights of children, globally….(More)”.
Legal and Ethical Issues of Crowdsourcing
Alqahtani, Bashayr et al in the International Journal of Computer Applications: “Crowdsourcing is lately developed expression which meaning that the outsourcing process of activities by crowd in the form of an ‘open call’ or a firm to an online community. An assigned task can be completed by any member of the crowd and be paid due to their efforts, also to attract the best possible ideas and approaches to boost innovation or to complete data processing tasks. Though the labor organization form was pioneered in the calculation sector, businesses companies have begun using ‘crowdsourcing’ for a various domain of tasks that they discover can be preferable completed and good achieved with crowds’ members instead of their own employees. This research will define the principle of crowdsourcing, types of it, challenges of crowdsourcing, also it will explain advantages and disadvantages and the way that firms are utilizing marketing task application crowdsourcing for the completion, discuss some of legal issues and ethical issues with regulations. Finally, this article will be completed as a paper research for crowdsourcing…(More)”.
The role of Open Data in driving sustainable mobility in nine smart cities
Paper by Piyush Yadav et al: “In today’s era of globalization, sustainable mobility is considered as a key factor in the economic growth of any country. With the emergence of open data initiatives, there is tremendous potential to improve mobility. This paper presents findings of a detailed analysis of mobility open data initiatives in nine smart cities – Amsterdam, Barcelona, Chicago, Dublin, Helsinki, London, Manchester, New York and San Francisco. The paper discusses the study of various sustainable indicators in the mobility domain and its convergence with present open datasets. Specifically, it throws light on open data ecosystems in terms of their production and consumption. It gives a comprehensive view of the nature of mobility open data with respect to their formats, interactivity, and availability. The paper details the open datasets in terms of their alignment with different mobility indicators, publishing platforms, applications and API’s available. The paper discusses how these open datasets have shown signs of fostering organic innovation and sustainable growth in smart cities with impact on mobility trends. The results of the work can be used to inform the design of data driven sustainable mobility in smart cities to maximize the utilization of available open data resources….(More)”.
Gender Biases in Cyberspace: A Two-Stage Model, the New Arena of Wikipedia and Other Websites
Paper by Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid and Amy Mittelman: “Increasingly, there has been a focus on creating democratic standards and norms in order to best facilitate open exchange of information and communication online―a goal that fits neatly within the feminist aim to democratize content creation and community. Collaborative websites, such as blogs, social networks, and, as focused on in this Article, Wikipedia, represent both a cyberspace community entirely outside the strictures of the traditional (intellectual) proprietary paradigm and one that professes to truly embody the philosophy of a completely open, free, and democratic resource for all. In theory, collaborative websites are the solution for which social activists, intellectual property opponents, and feminist theorists have been waiting. Unfortunately, we are now realizing that this utopian dream does not exist as anticipated: the Internet is neither neutral nor open to everyone. More importantly, these websites are not egalitarian; rather, they facilitate new ways to exclude and subordinate women. This Article innovatively argues that the virtual world excludes women in two stages: first, by controlling websites and filtering out women; and second, by exposing women who survived the first stage to a hostile environment. Wikipedia, as well as other cyber-space environments, demonstrates the execution of the model, which results in the exclusion of women from the virtual sphere with all the implications thereof….(More)”.
Open Government: Concepts and Challenges for Public Administration’s Management in the Digital Era
Tippawan Lorsuwannarat in the Journal of Public and Private Management: “This paper has four main objectives. First, to disseminate a study on the meaning and development of open government. Second, to describe the components of an open government. Third, to examine the international movement situation involved with open government. And last, to analyze the challenges related to the application of open government in Thailandus current digital era. The paper suggests four periods of open government by linking to the concepts of public administration in accordance with the use of information technology in the public sector. The components of open government are consistent with the meaning of open government, including open data, open access, and open engagement. The current international situation of open government considers the ranking of open government and open government partnership. The challenges of adopting open government in Thailand include clear policy regarding open government, digital gap, public organizational culture, laws supporting privacy and data infrastructure….(More)”.